Your Estimated Time of Arrival Is.

I generally make an effort not to dwell on transportation mishaps, as the best travel writers seldom bore their readers with the ins and outs of navigating a bus schedule (half of our time in Harbin was spent walking nowhere and riding the bus the wrong way to the outer extremities of a humongous city. Wanna hear about it? No?) However, I’ve decided it’s worth noting that our red-eye flight from Shanghai, forecasted to land in Delhi at 2:45 a.m., unceremoniously flew past and landed in Mumbai, it’s second destination, instead. My worst traveling fear, of falling asleep in transit and waking up in the wrong city, was realized.

Our company made the indefinite delay tolerable. We met Ramon, a button and zipper salesman (more exotic than it sounds) from Netherlands, a collection of Indian students who just finished medical school in Shanghai, and a lovely Chinese businesswoman who let me use her cell phone to inform our driver that we’d be indefinitely late. He took the eleven-hour delay as an opportunity to do absolutely nothing at the airport and then charge us for eleven hours of parking. When we finally arrived in Delhi, we heard an almost-thorough announcement that another flight would arrive late. At the end of the message, the announcer said, “The estimated time of arrival is.” Is. Is we have no idea so we’re not going to say anything. The Indians in line were stoic, unphased, while travel-weary and delirious Westerners doubled over laughing.